How To Create And Submit Sitemaps To Google Webmaster Tools

If you want to get more hits to your Blog making your blog 'search engine friendly' is an absolute must.Sitemaps basically show Google search bots you recent activity quicker and without the bells and wistles than can cause crawl errors (Dirthy words to a blogger).

Im always trying to provide better tips and improve the tutorials when possable and this post has been updated from the original to include a second sitemap.Why? The first sitemap only contains your 26 most recent posts ! If you have more than 26 posts they are not indexed.You should still add both sitemaps, the more the better.

There is a number of ways to generate a sitemap for blogs and websites, here on blogger generating a sitemap and submitting it to Google can be done in 5 minutes and can be achieved by even the least experienced Blogger.What Is A Site map ?

"Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

They also act as a navigation aid by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.

Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of links is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site"(source :Wikipedia)

We have 3 sections to complete this tip

Getting your sitemap address

Submitting your blog to Google webmaster tools

Submitting your Sitemap to Google webmaster tools

So lets see how its done :

Sitemap 1.I will show you how this is done for future referance.

Getting the sitemap address

Step 1.Go to your blog and look at your blogs address in the browser at the top of the page it will be :http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/or if you have a custom domain :http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.com/Mine is http://www.createtheblogger.blogspot.com/

Step 2.Add the following to the end of your blogs URL :robots.txtSo now you have :http://www.YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/robots.txthttp://www.YOURBLOGNAME.com/robots.txtMine is http://www.createtheblogger.blogspot.com/robots.txtClick enter or go to go to the addressStep 3.Now once you go to this page it will look like this :

Sitemap:http://www.createtheblogger.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updatedAbove as i have highlighted in red is your site map address - that's it as far as getting the site map.Keep this you will need it later.

Sitemap 2.I will just give you the default 'atom 500' address :

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500

Now you can Submit your site map to Google.

Submitting your blog to Google webmaster tools

Step 1.If you do not already have a webmaster tools account to do this you go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ you can log in to webmaster tools with your Google account the same details you log into blogger with.

Webmaster tools is a Great source of information to see exactly how Google sees your blog but that's another days work..

Step 2.On the homepage if you have not already submitted your site to webmaster tools click 'Submit A Site' .You can submit your blog URL.Note: just submit your URL here http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com we enter the site map address later.